Chuck Sweeny: The role of guns and violence in Americans’ DNA

Why does America have so much gun violence? There’s a bumper sticker-type battle going on in the national media over the issue, with one side calling for more guns and the other side calling for fewer guns, or none at all.

Why does America have so much gun violence? There’s a bumper sticker-type battle going on in the national media over the issue, with one side calling for more guns and the other side calling for fewer guns, or none at all.

This is a bogus battle. We will always have lots of guns here because that’s our history. We were the country settled by people who rebelled violently against their colonial government, started a new country and enshrined in the Constitution the right to keep and bear arms for men who weren’t slaves.

Of course, they were talking about single-shot muskets, but that’s a column for another day.

Then, 72 years after that Constitution became law of the land, Southern states tried to break away and start their own country. The rebellion was stopped at the cost of 800,000 lives, the majority killed by guns ... the rest from infection and disease.

We shot most of the natives, then invited Europeans to settle the Midwest and West. If you could walk, see, hear and didn’t have TB, you were declared a legal immigrant, by golly. And we shortened your name so we could pronounce it.

All these people had one thing in common: They were escaping economic hardship and over-reaching government power over their lives. Americans to this day have a strain of anarchy deep within their souls. They kept guns primarily to defend themselves and their families against bears and mountain lions, to hunt for food and in case our government started acting like the ones they’d fled.

But while many of them were armed, few were dangerous.

Until about 30 years ago, there was a general consensus about the need to maintain an orderly society. Today, we live in a culture governed by such Madison Avenue slogans as “No rules, just right,” “Have it your way,” “Sometimes you have to break the rules” and “Just do it,” the ultimate anarchistic rallying cry.

The consensus about the need for self-control and good behavior to maintain a civil society no longer exists in some neighborhoods, and children do not know how to act because, regardless of whether they have good parents, the mass culture is telling them to be consumers above all, which breeds narcissism. Some of the narcissists become sociopaths, and a very few take out their frustrations on many of their fellow humans in public places.

We focus as a nation only on mass murders, which are sensational, not the mundane one-on-one gun deaths that happen nightly in a few neighborhoods across the nation, usually between rival male street gang members arguing over drug deals gone bad.

In a meeting with local law enforcement leaders Friday at City Hall, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., referenced the Newtown, Conn., school shooting where 26 people died: “Since Dec. 14, there have been 24 murders in Chicago.” Anybody hear about that?

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These young men and those like them in Rockford don’t use AR-15 assault rifles, they use 9mm handguns.

There are some reasonable things we can do: keep better track of people with mental illness and make sure they can never buy guns. We can require legal gun owners to lock their weapons in safes so they can’t be stolen by burglars or taken by crazed family members like Adam Lanza, the Newtown slayer.

We can go after leaders of today’s gangs as we did the leaders of gangs during Prohibition, when it was mainly “the feds” who broke the backs of gangs controlling the liquor trade by putting away their leaders on any charge they could make stick — income tax evasion, for instance.

Of course, the war on the liquor gangs wouldn’t have been needed if we hadn’t declared war on alcohol. And the war on drugs wouldn’t have been needed if we hadn’t declared a war on drugs 40 years ago, ironically, to protect alcohol as our only legal, taxed drug of choice.

We can liberalize drug laws, legalize marijuana, which would seriously curtail the drug gangs’ power. But so far we have learned nothing from the American debacle of Prohibition, which made outlaws of half the population.

Banning liquor was so unsuccessful, we passed another constitutional amendment, this one ending the ban in 1933. Overnight, half the population stopped being and acting like outlaws.